Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

Last week, he returned one of my essays with a penciled lecture on my behavior. He wrote that graduating depended on being a great student, which I had the potential to be, but getting a job depended on politics, which I sucked at. I paraphrase. His point was that my writing was good, my research was great, but I’d been getting too many complaints about my attitude from students, from my peers, and from the dean.

When I don’t answer him right away, my dissertation director says, “Getting a job depends on politics .” His voice is damp, plummy, an old-man whiskey voice. “Playing the game. Part of which is, you don’t tell your dissertation director to fuck off.” He makes air quotes when he says “fuck.”

I grin. “Oh,” I say. “Okay.” I make air quotes around “okay.”

“See? That’s another example of what I was talking about. You get away with as much as you do because you’re a great student. But you’ll never become a great academic until you learn a little respect.”

At least he didn’t say I got away with as much as I did because of the dean.

“I respect you,” I say.

He smiles suddenly. The soft leathery wrinkles of his cheek fall into creased folds like a well-worn map. “I know,” he says. “That’s why I know you’ll think about what I said. Right?” He gives my backpack an awkward pat and then turns to go into his office. He stops in the doorway. “And I believe the dean wanted to see you.”

“I know.”

“All right, then. Tell him I send salutations.”

He disappears into his office.

I stand in the hallway and ball my fists in my pockets. The folded pink slip rubs against my skin. I could go see the dean.

Or I could investigate the message.

I decide to take the bait. I’ve got nothing better to do.

Allyn is the name of a street near campus. I have driven past it before, but it exists outside the periphery of my small world of classroom, car, and assiduously avoided office.

I walk out into decay-spiced autumn air and hike down the cobbled slope of the main campus, then turn down an alley behind a parking garage. A warren of shabby houses, all crackled paint and slanted ridgepoles, swarm the southern bank of the university like a scabrous architectural infection. I glance again at the pink slip in my hand, at what I assume must be an address, and a cryptic quote from Friedrich Nietzsche.

Cars hurtle down Exchange Street. I cross at the light and walk up a block past a blood plasma center, a pawnshop with barred windows, a bar whose neon brew signs flicker dyspeptically. I stop at the street corner where Allyn, a cramped alley, runs into Exchange Street.

I turn down Allyn. Weeds sprout through the cracked sidewalk. Collapsing houses crowd each other, their yellowed, overgrown lawns reaching across boundary lines like jaundiced fingers. I walk slowly, looking left and right.

And stop suddenly.

411 Allyn is indeed an address, but the house occupying the plot of land is a structural carcass. Plywood nailed over the windows, a yellow plastic streamer across the front door, paint chipping off aluminum siding, and bald patches of tar showing through shingles.

I believe this edifice is what is known in the vernacular as a “crack house,” a building once used but now condemned for its role in the sale of cocaine or, more likely, the refining, cooking, and selling of methamphetamines. Because I live in my parents’ garage, and have done so for most of my twenty-eight years, I have never had the opportunity to view even the remains of such a den of vice.

This lack of experience suddenly seems wrong, a deficit that must be immediately rectified.

Half-smiling, intensely curious, I go up the drive, the fine gravel like crushed shells under my feet. A side door stands partially open, hanging crookedly on two broken hinges. I reach out to touch the door. And such a feeling suffuses my bloodstream, adrenaline rushing through veins and arteries. I can’t believe how cramped, how stultified, my life has become, my God, how bored I’ve been since — oh, since I moved into my parents’ garage ten years ago.

My chest expands and constricts.

Even gods decompose .

I push open the door and step inside. Darkness closes around me like a shroud when the door swings closed after my entrance. I blink and wait for my eyes to adjust, for the pale rainy light outside to reach into the cavernous gloom.

A chalky smell has leeched into the concave walls. The house sounds empty, the sort of dull stillness you only notice when the electricity and water have been long turned off. A faint musty, mammalian stench, as if wild animals have camped out in here at some point. A couple of empty rooms to the left and right. And straight in front of me, a narrow flight of stairs that climbs into shadow.

I walk up the stairs slowly, the fingers of my left hand running along the wall, my feet delicate, searching each stair before I lever my weight onto it.

A hallway. A thin carpet, creaky floorboards.

A door to the right. I reach out to open it, then hesitate. I don’t know what lies inside. I don’t even know what kind of hide-and-seek game I’m playing at. Is my mysterious message-leaver a chess player, intrigued by mental gymnastics? He, or she, I suppose, could be sending me on goose chases, trying to see how much influence over my actions he can wield. But what if my Nietzsche-quoting stalker is actually dangerous?

I know that this is a bad idea. I push the door open anyway.

For a second, I hesitate, every muscle tensed, waiting for something — anything. But the room is empty.

Another door on the left, latched shut. I touch the door handle. It turns. The door creaks and sighs. A smell, the cold touch of wind on my skin and the smell. A sweet reek, like raw sugar and mold-softened tomatoes.

I reach into my pocket, feel the cold teeth of my car keys. Find a thin plastic tube, a miniature flashlight attached to the keychain. I click on the flashlight. Iodine-yellow light trips across the room. Wooden floorboards, an antique bureau with clawed feet, the veneer chipped and faded in patches, each porcelain knob stenciled with tiny violets.

In the opposite corner of the room, a twin-sized mattress on a metal bedframe. Something is lying on the bed. I inhale sharply.

The flashlight blinks off when my hand momentarily loses all messages from the neurons frantically misfiring in my brain.

I can’t breathe.

My thumb presses on the flashlight button again. The beam pins the bed in its single-eyed gaze.

A man lies facedown on the mattress, his arms cuffed at the wrists to the bedposts. His legs are duct-taped at the ankles. The skin of his back is slit down the spine and spread like wings across the bed sheets.

My heart kicks against my ribs and electricity fizzes through my veins. My pupils dilate. I have to, fuck , I have to leave.

My feet shift. A step closer to the bed. And then I am bending over it.

My hair swings down. The strands brush against the body’s cold skin. I pull my hair back, wrap the length around my fist and tie the hank into a knot.

The corpse has been flayed, his back skin pulled apart like fabric. The skin drapes white-clotted against persimmon-red sheets. The red sheets are bleached pinkish-yellow in patches as if some acidic substance splattered them.

Knots of vertebrae like sea sponge, slender yellowed laths of ribs. Clumps of macerated pink flesh cling to the bone. The head and neck are intact, the skin split from the protruding curve of spine at the base of the shoulders down to the lumbar vertebrae at the top of the swell of buttocks.

Venetian blinds stir as rain-scented wind snakes in the cracked windowpane. Broken slats clack against each other like teeth. I take a breath. The smell of blood, cold soil and coins.